Now let’s take a look at how that choice of anchor text may influence our rankings.

How Anchor Text Influences Search Engine Rankings

Search engines (from here on I will refer to Google) use the anchor texts linking to a page as an indicator of the page’s topic; i.e which keywords it should rank for.

In simple terms, if I was to link to a page from this article with the anchor text “dog biscuits”, this would indicate to Google that I (or Ahrefs) believe that the linked site is a good fit for that query.

And again, to simplify:

The more sites that link with the anchor containing the phrase “dog biscuits” (exact or partial), the more certain Google will be that the linked page should rank for that query.

But of course, nothing in SEO is ever simple. At least not any more.

Early Google’s (Over) Reliance On Anchor Text

The text of links is treated in a special way in our search engine. Most search engines associate the text of a link with the page that the link is on. In addition, we associate it with the page the link points to. This has several advantages. First, anchors often provide more accurate descriptions of web pages than the pages themselves.

(yes, they were much more transparent back then)

Using anchor text would also allow Google to determine the topic of (and return in search results) media formats where on-page signals could not be used.

Second, anchors may exist for documents which cannot be indexed by a text-based search engine, such as images, programs, and databases. This makes it possible to return web pages which have not actually been crawled.

The logic was sound, and the early results impressive, however…

This was VERY open to manipulation.

To rank a web page for a query, all an SEO had to do was point multiple links at it with their target keyword as the anchor.

More keyword rich anchor text links than your competitor = you won that particular rankings battle.

We are looking to dilute our anchor text profile. We hired you to build white hat links – anchor texts should ONLY contain our brand name! Anything else is manipulation and we will get penalized by Google.

So is Ryan’s client correct? Should we really be avoiding using ANY keyword phrases in our anchor text to avoid penalty? And for that matter, does anchor text continue to influence rankings?

To find out, we conducted 2 studies:

The first study was small and looked at anchor text influence on rankings in competitive niches. The second study cast the net rather wider and looked at anchor text influence across 16,000 keywords.

Influence Of Exact Match Anchors

First I took a look at the percentage of exact match anchors from individual referring domains — calculated against the total number of individual referring domains to the URL.

I included the median figure as there were certain niches (for example payday loans) that were very anchor text heavy, so I was conscious they may distort the percentages.

Position

Average

Median

1

7.64%

1.96%

2

8.67%

0.85%

3

6.77%

0.00%

4

5.75%

0.10%

5

4.24%

0.00%

Now for the actual volumes (number) of exact match anchor links.

Position

Exact Match (Average)

Exact Match (Median)

1

24

2

2

37

1

3

8

0

4

10

1

5

12

0

INFERENCES

The data above would suggest that exact match anchors still have some influence on top placements in competitive niches.

Average is high, but as mentioned the data is skewed somewhat by certain niches, so I would err towards the median results and suggest a percentage of 1 to 2% (and a low number, i.e. 2 or 3) would be safe and potentially help with rankings at page level.

But that was a percentage of links from the total backlink profile of a page.

What if we look at a raw number of referring domains with both exact and partial match anchor text links?

The takeaway here is clear – anchor text links from a variety of different domains correlate with higher rankings in Google.

Experiment #2

One thing that Experiment #1 revealed is that pages with more backlinks from different domains tend to outperform pages with less backlinks. This is what we would expect to see.

So in Experiment #2 we decided to level the effect of a strong backlink profile and only compare the data on pages with similar numbers and quality of incoming links.

We limited our keywords to those where the Top 5 Google results’ URL Rank had standard deviation of less than 30% of their average value. This left us with about 2,000 keywords (out of the original 16,000).

Here’s how this changed the numbers:

INFERENCES

In cases where pages had equally strong backlink profiles it was the % of partial match anchor text links that mattered the most, while the % of exact match links stayed more or less consistent across the Top 5 results.

Does Anchor Text Still Influence Rankings?

The Caveats

Firstly, there is the standard correlation does not imply causation.

Google has over 200 ranking factors, and while the data above would suggest that keyword usage in anchor text continues to be one of them (and you probably should build some keyword rich links) there are numerous other factors which may have influenced the rankings of these pages.

Secondly, we are unable to tell if any of the links I/we discovered have subsequently been disavowed, which could be the case in some of the particularly keyword rich profiles.

So as always, take everything with a grain of salt and conduct your own tests.

That being said…

I Believe Anchor Text Continues To Influence Rankings

Caveats in place, I’m going to stick my neck out and say that keyword prevalence in anchor text is almost certainly still a ranking factor, and perhaps a bigger one than Google would like us to believe. It’s what the data tells us.

So, if you’re building links (or someone is building links for you) then you probably don’t need to be too sensitive about anchor text, and a few keyword rich links as part of a diverse profile should help you rank.

Just don’t go crazy though and from the data above, I would suggest exact match at around 2% and phrase match at around 30% will keep you on the right side of Google.

Of course, as always, the strongest and safest links are those which are editorially earned and you should always avoid building low quality links, regardless of anchor text.

Over To You…

What’s your thoughts on keyword rich anchors?

Do you continue to build them, or do you avoid them like the plague? Any observations from your own site? Have you been penalised in the past? Any other questions?

As always it would be great to hear from you, so please drop a comment below!